The Tarski-Vaught Test
Fix a language L, and take L-structures N⪯M.
Then the following two statements are equivalent:
N is an
elementary substructure of
M
For every
L formula ϕ=ϕ(v,x) and tuple
a∈N<ω, we have the following:
if exists an
m∈M with
M⊨ϕ(m,a) then exists an
n∈N with
N⊨ϕ(n,a)